Universal Paragon Corp. has advanced longstanding plans to develop the last vacant, privately owned parcel at Sierra Point — a small man-made peninsula on Brisbane’s eastern shore — into a new hotel and a life sciences building totaling just over 1 million square feet.
The application for what is known as Project Axon was filed in late July and is currently under review by Brisbane’s Planning Department. It calls for the construction of an 11-story hotel with 608 guest rooms, an outdoor pool and a wedding chapel, as well as a publicly accessible all-day-dining restaurant, 20,000 square feet of event space and 11,600 square feet of meeting rooms.
The hotel and adjacent 11-story building providing some 657,600 square feet of office and life sciences space would be built atop a parking podium with 1,200 stalls at 9000 Marina Blvd.
The buildings, designed by San Francisco architecture firm Gensler, would be connected by a publicly accessible open space on the roof of the proposed parking podium.
“The subtle raised podium would provide a unique opportunity for employees, visitors, and members of public to enjoy elevated views of the San Francisco Bay,” the project team wrote in its application. “At-grade accesses would also be designed to allow connections to and from the future planned park.”
An environmental review must be conducted before the project can be scheduled for a public hearing — most likely in late 2023 — according to the city’s planning department.
The roughly 6-acre site is part of the former municipal landfill located some 300 feet from the Brisbane Marina, and adjacent to space earmarked for development into the city’s future Triangle Park. It is located east of The Towers at Sierra Point, two buildings that once served as the Opulus campus at 2000 Sierra Point Parkway and 8000 Marina Blvd. pegged for redevelopment by real estate investment trust Healthpeak Properties Inc. (NYSE: PEAK). Healthpeak has filed a proposal to integrate the existing buildings into a “state of the art life science development” totaling 1.28 million square feet, including the construction of two new towers on the site.
The Axon project is also adjacent to The Shore at Sierra Point, a $600 million, five-building campus totaling over 620,000 square feet across 23 acres on Brisbane’s waterfront that is currently under construction by Healthpeak. On the other side of the peninsula sits the Genesis Marina project from Phase 3 Real Estate Partners, the future home of Freenome.
Check out the gallery below for the latest renderings of the Axon project.
I’ve reached out for comment to UPC — which is working on the Axon Project through its affiliate, Baylands Development Inc.— and will update this story once I hear back. The developer said in its application that the proposed life sciences building will provide about 50% to 60% of its floor area to research and development uses, while the rest will be earmarked as office space.
The developer said that the project would be “designed and constructed on a speculative basis,” meaning that the future tenancy and therefore, its operations, are not yet known. Roughly 3,700 square feet of active uses, which may include a café for the building’s future tenants, a cafeteria, and retail shops, would be located along the Sierra Point Parkway.
UPC is also the developer behind the planned transformation of more than 580 acres known as the Brisbane Baylands — a former rail yard and landfill immediately south of the San Francisco border — into 2,200 homes and 7 million square feet of commercial space. Voters approved the project in 2018 after many years of controversy. The project has yet to break ground and its timeline has been slowed by the pandemic and financing issues.
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